Broken Seal
by TheVelvetDusk
Summary: A sleepless night, too much shattered glass, and maybe a mutual need for a bit of anger management. {exists somewhere post-2x04, lyatt oneshot}


_a/n: Once again, I thought there was plenty of love triangle angst already out there without throwing my hat into the ring, so this was NOT on my radar… But oh no no no - someone just had to send me a list of tumblr prompts (side-eyeing the lovely & all too entertaining Katertots), and one of those prompts just refused to be ignored, so here we are! MORE ANG_ _ST. Cool._

 _(I think I was half asleep when I edited this, so here's a salute to all the mistakes that surely crept in)_

 _Prompt: "You found me crying on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night surrounded by a shattered jelly jar."_

* * *

The sudden shattering disruption from somewhere down the hall didn't wake him. It was impossible to wake a person who did not - _could not_ \- sleep.

His gun was drawn, footfalls light. His body had been tensed for hours as if in preparation for this exact moment.

Because that was him, right? Always spoiling for a fight no matter the era or timeline.

His adrenaline flatlined as he edged his way into the kitchen. What awaited him there required no defense, no bullets, no violence; but as Wyatt shoved his gun back into the waistband of his jeans, it was clear that _some_ violence would have surely made him feel a hell of a lot better. His knuckles were aching with a need to drive his fist through a wall or a window or really just anything that would mercilessly split his skin open.

Lucy sat alone with her knees folded up to her chest, crying silently - well, _almost_ silently - on the filthy floor, surrounded with thick globs of something dark.

And glass. Tiny shards of sharp-edged glass, barely illuminated in the sparsely lit room, glittering in a thousand little pieces all around her.

She was biting back a louder sob. Each rickety breath she stole - too quick, too incomplete - told him that she was scarcely suppressing a much bigger breakdown.

He almost backed off without a word. She hadn't noticed him yet, and if she did happen to look up, then she might send him away, and wasn't it better to just send himself away before she had the chance?

But if she didn't send him away… If he actually got close enough to touch her, to hold her, to find out why the hell she was a second away from sobbing her heart out on the Silo floor well after midnight…

Well, that may have stirred something dangerous inside of him, something that might have made him a little less capable of looking his wife in the eye the next morning. It was one thing to be in the same room as Lucy with a handful of other people, to soak up any meager scrap of her existence on the pretext of their shared mission, to restrain himself to sidelong looks while everyone else talked strategy... But here, in the cover of so much darkness, with just those bottomless brown eyes and a noose of regret around his neck - a noose with her name on it...

Because _that's_ the image he needed right now - nooses. Salem. Another notch of self-hatred added to his collection.

Lucy sniffled loudly, drew her shoulders higher, and began to sweep her hands out in front of her with a motion that looked far too devil-may-care for his liking. It provoked a noise of warning from his throat, one that instantly had her tensing up and whipping her startled eyes up to his.

" _Shit_ , Wyatt. Walk a little louder, would you?"

The spooked look didn't fade, not even as the moment stretched on for far too long, as if they'd been trapped there against their will, doomed to stare at each other indefinitely. And then Lucy was trying to smile up at him in spite of the absurd mess around her. She may have even succeeded in arranging the corners of her mouth higher despite the devastating pull of gravity, but then her tears started coming faster, harder, like steady rivers of rain down a windowpane. It washed away the last of his uncertainty in an flash.

Wyatt crunched over the minefield of glass and unidentified goo that surrounded her, suddenly grateful that he'd been too shell-shocked by the ever-shifting hellscape of his life to shed a single article of clothing no matter the lateness of the hour. He'd lost track of it all, even down to the heavy boots that were now sporting the wreckage of what he assumed to be typical Lucy Preston clumsiness.

He knelt before her, eased her shaking frame upwards with a cautious hand to her good elbow, then took one look at her sock-clad feet and blew out a frustrated sigh. "Hold still."

His hands went around her waist and she inhaled so severely that he knew he'd just crossed an invisible line...a line he'd damn well known _had_ to be there now, but to have it blatantly confirmed just like that…

He'd be lucky if he made it through this night without bowing his head over the toilet and unleashing the sickness that had been building in his gut for hours.

Wyatt held Lucy against him in spite of every instinct that told him not to, lifting her just enough so that her feet cleared the floor, then traipsed back through the broken remnants until he could deposit her safely on the couch across the room.

His hands shook without her inside of them.

First he found a box of tissues, leaving them within her reach before backing away quickly. Then he went for the broom and dustpan, making fast work of the scattered pieces of glass pinwheeled in every conceivable direction. Third came the heaps of wet paper towels, the ones that were supposed to clear the sticky residue of something purple - jelly? preservatives? - from the floor, but that shit was stubborn and to be perfectly honest, he didn't really care so much about that. What was one more shitty stain on this shitty floor? Would anyone actually notice a new random splatter of mysterious origins come tomorrow? He doubted it.

Lucy watched. She looked on without a word, without an offer to help, without a single thought in her head…

Because it was too hard to concentrate on anything other than the lingering burn from where his hands had clamped tightly around her waist. His hands on her, even through a few layers of clothing and the considerable distance of God knows how many other hindrances, resonated too deeply to be dismissed or ignored. If she closed her eyes, she knew she'd see his strong hands lit by golden firelight, sliding slowly over her naked skin, cherishing every part of her as she trembled beneath him.

Better to keep her eyes open. Better to watch him scrub the floor in the shadows. Better to keep her head above water, or she might just drown.

He flopped down next to her in another minute or two, pointedly leaving as much space between them as the couch would allow.

"Wanna talk about it?" he asked at just above a whisper.

"I could ask you the same thing."

His attempt at a half grin was a pathetic imitation of the real thing. "Touché."

She didn't know what else to say. She'd been unapologetically bold with him so many times before, spoken into a multitude of impossible situations as they stumbled from one calamity to the next, readily defended herself when he'd basically called her out as a cold-hearted bitch for choosing history - choosing _fate_ \- over humanity on any given day. Tonight, though...tonight, she had nothing to offer at all. Not in the way of explanation, not to dismantle this new awkwardness between them, just...nothing.

And fate? Fate had turned out to be the coldest-hearted bitch of them all.

"Is it okay if I…if I just sit here a little longer?"

She despised the venomous piece of her mind that wanted to turn his quiet question into a small victory. He'd rather sit here - with the skinny screwed-up basket case who couldn't even unscrew the lid off a damn jar without collapsing into hysterics - than return to wherever it was that he'd likely been holed up with _her_.

But she couldn't let herself become that woman. She was not comfortable with the idea that she'd degenerated into the type of person who'd taken one look at his current attire - jeans, shoes, shirt - and immediately cataloged his middle of the night appearance as a far cry from the way he'd slept when he fell into bed next to her.

No. Lucy Preston would _not_ pit herself against a man's wife. Her mother may not have been a grand paragon of virtue any longer, but the woman who'd raised her - the trailblazing feminist advocate that Lucy still held onto in what remained of her fragile pre-time travel memories - had taught her better than that.

So she made up her mind to release him. _Again_. How many goddamn times would she have to release him? "You, um...you probably shouldn't."

"But maybe we're wrong," he protested unconvincingly. "Maybe talking would be…"

He couldn't say the word _good_ or _right_ or whatever it was that he was searching for, and the significance of his inability to tack on one of those words wasn't lost on Lucy.

"I'm not so sure about that," she whispered softly, her heart folding in on itself as she recalled the way that talking had always linked her soul a little more closely to his.

"There are...there are things I think you deserve to hear."

Lucy was confident that those things would probably hurt more than they'd help, but she didn't stop him. Her guard had been up all damn day. Would it really be so bad to wallow for just a moment now, sitting here with him in almost utter darkness, near enough that she could imagine his solid weight brushing against her?

But she hadn't been imagining it. He'd shifted closer so that his arm danced lightly over hers.

"I have meant every word I've said to you...all of it." Wyatt's eyelids folded shut with too many tiny exhausted creases. "So you know the shittiest part? If this works - if she sticks around - I'll be this person with her...this person that _you_ put back together, and that makes me so damn angry for you, Lucy. It's just - it's…"

If he so much as breathed the word 'fair' she might have screamed, so she snatched the lead away from him, stammering out a question to extinguish his floundering sentence. "Why...why wouldn't it work? What do you - what does that even mean?"

He leveled ocean blue eyes at her once more. "She has divorce papers. _Signed_ divorce papers. It's the reason I brought her here, to - to try to prove that the guy she was ready to divorce really wasn't me."

Her head fell back against the couch. She stared up at the ceiling, unblinking, her mind whirling in overdrive. "She - how could she - that's insane. She's - "

"Turns out her version of me was no prize of a husband," he broke in flatly. "The more I think about it, the more I'm sure that her Wyatt sounds a little more familiar than I care to admit. We were on a bad path back then, and I - I must not have tried hard enough to fix it in this reality, not without...not without knowing..."

Lucy could have finished that one for him, too - without knowing what it would be like to carry the weight of her murder for six long years.

"She won't do it, Wyatt. There's no way…" she shook her head adamantly, fresh tears trailing between sodden lashes. "Give it time. You'll change her mind. She'll see she's wrong about you."

And now Wyatt was the one who could plainly hear what she wasn't saying.

She was sure that Jessica wouldn't divorce this version of him because _Lucy_ couldn't imagine a reality that ended in divorce. Jess couldn't possibly drive the final nail into their marriage because _Lucy_ wasn't able to understand the idea of leaving him behind. Here she was, the woman he was so cruelly abandoning, offended on his behalf at the thought of his wife rejecting him. Because that was how unflinchingly Lucy supported him. That's how convinced she was of what she would do if she was the one in Jessica's place.

What was intended to make him feel better only succeeded in reinstating another wave of nausea deep within his gut.

He bailed out like a coward. He wasn't as strong as her. He couldn't bear to discuss his fractured marriage with her for another moment, so he dropped his gaze to her other arm and shifted gears with all the finesse of a man who was flying blind and drunk with both hands tied behind his back.

"Why aren't you taking your painkillers?"

Her expression turned dark. _Caught_. He loved and hated how easily he could read the guilty admission in her eyes. "How are you so sure I'm not?"

"I saw the dosage, Lucy. I've known guys two or three times your size who went down hard on the same stuff. Call me crazy for assuming you don't have a higher tolerance for narcotics than a few of the human tanks I've served with."

She reached down to twist her locket in her hand, emitting an unimpressed grunt. "I don't like how it feels, alright? It was one thing when they were knocking me straight out, but then this awful numbness set in and I - I don't know. My body was asleep but my head was awake...way too awake, too loud. So maybe if my arms hurts more…"

Then her head would be quieter. She was choosing to feel more physical pain in an attempt to silence the other pain. The Rittenhouse pain. The Carol Preston pain. The Amy pain. The Wyatt-has-a-wife-now pain.

He'd never forgive himself for getting his name tacked onto the end of that list.

"Just please…" his throat got all clogged up, but he pressed on, sounding absolutely wretched even to his own ears, "please tell me you've kept up with the antibiotics."

She nudged her shoulder against his with a weary smile. "I'm not an idiot, Wyatt."

If that was supposed to lighten the mood, it had fallen tragically short. "I'm worried about you."

"Don't be," she answered with a brimming sigh.

"I need you to stop saying that," he breathed out weakly, eyebrows crumpling together.

"Stop saying… _don't be_?"

"On the phone, before...that's what you said when I told you I was sorry. And now, I - I _am_ worried. And I can't just turn that off. I don't know how you're handling all of this so damn well, but I'm afraid I'm not quite as well-adjusted as you, so - "

"Well-adjusted?" Lucy laughed a hard, brittle laugh. "You found me crying on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night surrounded by a shattered jelly jar. Does that sound like the behavior of a well-adjusted person to you?"

He forced a wry smile. "Point taken. I'm sure that jar really had it coming, though."

"Just one piece of toast. That's all I wanted, but I couldn't open that damn thing no matter what I did. And then I got mad. Mad that I - that I needed someone else to do something so stupid for me."

Someone like the guy she was trying to detox herself from, he supposed. The guy who was currently too powerless to pry himself away from her side.

"So you decided to open it by cracking the whole thing off of a concrete floor? Effective, that's for sure."

"Don't tell anyone," she requested softly, her head sweeping sideways just enough to skim his shoulder. "I have enough to deal with right now. They can't send me straight to anger management classes, okay? I know I need a couple years worth of therapy at this point, but I'm not starting there. I won't do it."

"Me? Blowing the whistle on _you_ for punishing an inanimate object? That would be the sham of the century. There's a cracked tile in the bathroom that can vouch for my spot in that same anger management class, Lucy."

She arched a brow, the first real smile he'd seen all night flickering to the surface. "Really?"

Wyatt shrugged. "I was having a hard time dealing with a certain historian's absence around here."

"God, Jiya wasn't kidding when she said you'd been a miserable bastard for six straight weeks, was she?"

"Not in the slightest. It was full-on miserable bastard mode. I'm surprised they didn't rig an eject button under my ass by week two."

Lucy filed that revelation away into the secret compartment of things she wasn't quite ready to let go of...a compartment that was growing far too full with every passing second.

It was only when she couldn't fight it anymore - couldn't pour one last ounce of effort into an unenthusiastic resistance - that her head came to rest fully on his shoulder.

"Just...another minute, okay?" she whispered with her eyes squeezed shut. "Then you should go."

She felt Wyatt's breath catch in his chest.

"Okay."

It was a whole lot closer to ten minutes by the time Lucy could ease herself away from him.

That still wasn't long enough to silence the howling pain in her heart.

He took his cue and stood without a word, but his exit was diverted by an immediate detour. His silhouette slunk across to the kitchen where he began to rummage through the cupboards, not stopping until there was the sudden pop of a broken seal.

She stifled another outpouring of tears for long enough to allow his echoing steps to fade out of earshot.

A new jar of grape jelly was left open on the countertop.

* * *

 _Anddddd I hate myself. Goodnight, everyone!_


End file.
